I can't open them?I was typing away in the writing thread when my lap top faded off then popped back on.. my partial post was still there so I quickly copied it opened my Tomboy notes and pasted it to a new note in case the power went again..

Not knowing what was wrong I thought my laptop was dying and its new! [:(!]

I then looked up and it went off again black screen but this time it did not come back on.. bummed I went to stand up and remembered before I left I packed up the laptop and unplugged my serger while I was gone. When I went to bed I plugged my laptop in and turned it on and began checking mail and wandering the halls of the forum... thats when it went off. well I can not get my Tomboy notes to open back up.. It turns out that I was on the auxiliary power and my laptop battery died because I plugged it into the surge protector but failed to plug the surge protector back into the wall itself so I was using the battery until it died,

Now I have it on AC but still my notes will not open up! I have restarted the computer to no avail so I shut it totally down and waited a minute to reboot it still to NO avail!Short of removing the battery and restarting it that way I cannot get Tomboy notes to open.. it says its opening then boom nothing...

I've never used Tomboy Notes , but if the power failed while you were using this programme you may have to reinstall this software: your copy of the programme may have been corrupted because of the power failure, so now will not run correctly. A power failure could even corrupt your operating system (Linux OS): if that were the case other applications (other than Tomboy) would not run properly.

As I said I've never used this programme, hopefully your data (your notes) will survive re-installation.

A power-loss induced crash shouldn't require software re-installation. Once the software has been installed nothing should be writing to the code files. Similarly, unless you were actually changing settings at the time (and even then it's very unlikely because configuration files don't need to be held open once they've been read), your configuration should be ok too.

Are you actually running Tomboy on Linux? Although it's widely regarded as a Linux app, it's actually written in Microsoft C# and runs under the mono implementation of Microsoft's .Net environment, so it should run ok on MS Windows.

Anyway, the most likely problem is with your data, as this is the only stuff that should be being written to in normal use.

To check the software installation, set up a new temporary user, log in as that new user and then start Tomboy. If Tomboy starts ok in that new user it indicates that the software is still installed ok. Assuming that it does, as it's very unlikely that any software files or global settings would have been lost, as there's no need to write to them, it looks as though either your personal settings or your personal data repository have been lost or corrupt.

I don't know Tomboy, but I'm guessing that it manages its own data repository. That is, it doesn't connect to a proper database system running either on your system, or on a server somewhere, but maintains its own data file or folder somewhere in your home directory. It's likely that when you first ran Tomboy you would have been asked what to call it. If you can spot this from its name, or you remember what you called it, check that it's not empty or has a zero filesize.

Now when you restarted your system after the crash it's likely that the system detected the crash and automatically ran a filesystem check, and if the check found that your Tomboy repository hadn't been closed properly and was in an inconsistent state it would have likely moved it to the /lost+found folder. You can only look at this with root privileges, so if you can't find the Tomboy data repository in your home folder it may be in /lost+found. The trouble is though, that it'll probably have a meaningless name, so you can't just copy it back to your home folder without knowing what it was called. We'll come back to this later.

If you can find and identify your Tomboy repository though, the first thing to do is make a backup copy of it.

The next thing to try to do is start Tomboy from a terminal, to see if we can get some meaningful error messages. I'm guessing that you launch it either from a menu or by a desktop shortcut - could you see if you can get the 'properties' of the launcher i.e. right-click over the shortcut or menu entry. Somewhere in the property window that opens should be the actual command that is run to start Tomboy. There may just be a simple 'tomboy' wrapper that you can call, but it's just as likely to be something like:

/usr/bin/mono /usr/bin/tomboy.exe "$@"

After you've backed up your Tomboy repository, if you could find it, try typing that in and press Enter, to see if it tells us why it's not starting. If you couldn't find the repository, and it says it can't find the repository, then it looks like the repository was moved to /lost+found by the filesystem check. Hopefully, if Tomboy says it can't find the repository, it'll give the name it was looking for, so now you can try copying the file/folder from /lost+found back to where Tomboy expects to find it.

If it doesn't seem to be the case that the repository was moved by the filesystem check, then I think the next mostly likely problem is that your local settings have been corrupted. Uninstalling and then reinstalling the software probably won't help here because removing the software will only remove any global settings config files it has, but not your local settings. When you then reinstall and try running it again, it'll just try to use your old corrupt settings again. If it does look like this has happened, you'll need to remove your local Tomboy configuration settings and get it to recreate new ones. Your local Tomboy settings are likely to be held in the .gnome2/ folder, either directly within that folder, or within the .gnome2/accels/ sub-folder. Before you delete any existing Tomboy settings files, make a backup copy of them (it wouldn't be a bad idea to create a new folder in your home directory especially for these backups while you're trying to sort a problem out - then you don't need to worry about where you put them).

Once you've deleted any Tomboy settings files or folders, Tomboy should start again ok, although you'll have to re-enter any settings. If/when Tomboy asks you where you want your data repository, you can either point it towards your existing one, if it's still there (and you've made a backup of it) and see if it picks everything up, or tell it to create a new one, making a note of its name, and then if the facility is available, import the data from your old repository. Replacing the new Tomboy repository with the old one might also work after you've created the new one and then closed Tomboy down.

Are you actually running Tomboy on Linux? Although it's widely regarded as a Linux app, it's actually written in Microsoft C# and runs under the mono implementation of Microsoft's .Net environment, so it should run ok on MS Windows.

I may be mistaken but I think Karen had mentioned previously that she was using Linux, if she’s using Windows Vista then “System Restore” may be worth a try: it resets the computer to how it was few hours or days previously, (i.e. pre-crash). I don’t know if Linux has an equivalent of Windows “System Restore”.

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